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Come on, do businesses really need a blog?

It’s a lot of work, right? And there are so many other things you could be doing to bring revenue into the business. Do blogs matter? Are they worth the time that it takes to write 400 words for some unknown reader?

In this increasingly digital world, where content marketing is playing a greater role than ever before, the answer is an absolute yes. Consider for a moment the impact any given blog may have on you, even in subtle ways. The truth is, once you publish content, it can have a lasting impact on the reader and help foster positive feelings toward your brand. Especially when they’re centered around evergreen content, blogs work with both the short- and long-tail approach to content marketing.

Needless to say, blog content can have a significant impact on people’s perception of your company, and be well worth the investment of time. Here are our top three reasons why you should put your creative juices to work to create a blog for your business.

1. Blogs establish you as a thought leader. When you share your expertise in a blog post, you are positioning yourself as an authority on a topic. Blogs build brand awareness and highlight your industry knowledge. Customers like working with people who know their stuff.
2. Blogs increase your online searchability. When you publish a post, you get a quick boost in traffic. Over time, you reap the reward of ongoing search engine traffic because every time someone searches for a particular bit of information, your post comes up. Even better, blog posts can be repurposed into other forms of content such as ebooks and presentations.
3. Blogs create conversation. With comments and social sharing buttons, look for opportunities to interact directly with customers, prospects and other industry professionals. You may do this directly on your website. We love to take that conversation to LinkedIn, where longer-length content is part of the professional culture. Make your comments professional but informal. And let complainers know you’ll follow up with them offline to keep things upbeat and positive.

Ready for a business blog? Or are you considering it? We’d love to hear your thoughts on business blogging. Tell us what you’re doing (or not!) and why.

After many months/years of blogging about the same general industry, products and/or services, you may find yourself running out of new ideas for your blog. This happens to countless bloggers — individuals and companies alike — so you’re definitely not alone if you’ve been feeling burned out and not too creative lately.

However, consistent posting is absolutely essential for a successful content marketing strategy, so how can you come up with new ideas and keep producing outstanding content if you’ve written about everything under the sun? Here are some ideas for overcoming writer’s block and rejuvenating your blog content to continue your content marketing campaign’s success:

Repurpose Old Content

If you have any audio content (old interviews, podcasts, etc.) that hasn’t been published in text format yet, now’s the best time to get started! The same logic applies for videos (even if they have captions, some people just don’t like watching videos) or blog posts you haven’t converted into audio/video formats yet. You might even consider creating infographics with statistics and research from an old (but not out of date) blog post, or updating blog posts from two or three years ago with new research, new links and new commentary.

Bring in Guest Bloggers

If you’re burned out, maybe it’s best to take a brief break from blogging and let someone else take the reins for a while. Bringing in multiple guest bloggers offers many benefits: new and interesting perspectives your audience might not have been exposed to before, free high-quality content (usually in exchange for a link back to their website or blog), and time for you to rest and refocus without sacrificing your blog’s posting schedule. (You could drive away audience members if you’re not consistent).

Snoop on Your Competitors

Disclaimer: We’re not arguing in favor of plagiarism (which not only looks bad for search algorithms but also for audience members reading your blog). Instead of blatantly copying your competitors (which again, you should never do), you can find out what topics are popular on their blogs by browsing their comment sections and assessing their engagement rates on social media (especially “share” rates).

Even if you’re always on top of industry news, there may be opportunities for evergreen content that you’re overlooking. To keep your blog content fresh, interesting and informative, perform your own outside research and try to include more useful advice or insightful commentary that was missing from your competitors’ blog posts.

When individuals and brands first begin blogging, they often start out with a grand plan for scheduling well-researched content with clearly established goals and deadlines for each piece. Then — of course — life gets in the way and the idea of maintaining and updating an editorial calendar seems like a huge chore, one that eventually falls by the wayside in favor of a more spontaneous approach to content creation and curation.

Even if you still follow an editorial calendar to some extent, there are likely areas in your content strategy that could use improvement when it comes to your scheduling practices. Here are some strategies the most successful content marketers use to optimize their editorial calendars:

Create Daily or Weekly Themes

Do you write and publish whatever feels relevant to your brand in a given moment, or are there clear themes you’re covering each day or week? For example, you could conduct weekly interviews with industry experts that are published once per week on the same day (preferably in written and audio formats, if possible).

Alternatively, you could announce a theme at the beginning of each week and incorporate that theme into your blog posts, social media posts, and other content published throughout the week. Even with content themes, however, you’ll still want to mix up specialized content with evergreen content to ensure at least some of your blog retains a bit of longevity 3, 6 or 12+ months from now.

Stick to a Content Marketing Editorial Calendar

Do you currently have a content marketing editorial calendar? If so, is it in an Excel spreadsheet, Google form, content scheduling platform, or elsewhere? To maximize the likelihood of following your editorial calendar — and maintain your team’s motivation to stick to the calendar — you should consolidate all of your editorial notes, deadlines and other information in one easy to access location (bonus points if you can schedule upcoming blog and social posts from the same platform).

Write Content 2+ Weeks in Advance

Some people work better under the pressure of an impending deadline, but this is not an ideal strategy to rely on for the long-haul. Instead, your content writing team should be producing content at least two weeks in advance, which gives your design and editorial teams plenty of time to optimize the content for audience engagement and catch any mistakes before publication.

Even if new information comes out within that 2+ week timeframe that necessitates changes to the content, you’ll still be in a much better position if all you have to do is add or erase a sentence here and there, as opposed to writing, editing, and designing an entire blog post within a couple days.

Get Everyone Onboard

A final must-have in any successful content marketing strategy is team cohesion. In other words, you want everyone to be on the same page about each step of the content production and publication process. Even if you’re working with a remote content team, you should still schedule weekly or monthly team meetings to give everyone the chance to vocalize any issues or concerns they’re experiencing, which other team members could potentially help resolve.

This also requires consistent attention to your brand’s content guidelines, so that you’re always maintaining the same “voice” for your brand across channels (even if you have multiple content writers) and you can readily adapt to changes (e.g., SEO practices) whenever necessary with minimal disruption to your team.

When it comes to advertising on Facebook, diversifying your campaign strategies and objectives will typically produce better outcomes than running the same campaign over and over again with minimal tweaks. While it might seem intuitive to aim for more page likes with each campaign in order to bring in more followers who will then view your future posts in their feeds, you might find that other campaign objectives are more useful for your brand’s unique marketing goals.

To help you decide which central objective you should chose for your next Facebook advertising campaign, here’s the run-down on some major objectives that you should consider:

Page Likes

This is one of the most frequently chosen campaign objectives because many marketers assume that more people liking your page will translate into more engagement in future posts. However, now that Facebook allows users to unfollow people and pages, you’re not guaranteed to show up in people’s newsfeeds (especially if your post isn’t a paid promotion, as recent changes to Facebook policies indicated the company will prioritize posts from family and friends more than brands).

This objective is ideal for anyone who is new to advertising and Facebook and wants to grow their page. It’s general enough that you don’t need to put in a ton of time developing content for this campaign, and it’s an effective form of social proof when you have a solid base of Facebook followers to demonstrate you are actively increasing your brand’s presence on the social media platform.

Post Engagement

Sponsored or boosted posts are ideal for marketers who want to promote a specific product, service or event. You’re not overly concerned with attracting new members from your target audience as much as you want to drive awareness or sales around a specific thing, such as a new product release, revamped package pricing structures for your services, or an upcoming event.

With post engagement, you’ll likely get multiple people liking, commenting or sharing your post, even if they don’t like your page! This is a useful tool for reaching younger, tech-savvier audiences that are wary about liking pages after they were spammed by different pages in the 2010-2015 era (before Facebook started really adjusting its algorithm to prioritize content from friends over random pages people forget they had ever liked on Facebook).

Traffic

This campaign objective is ideal for advertising something you can’t fit into a single Facebook post. For instance, you may have a landing page with long-form content, video and multiple photos – something that would never work for a simple Facebook post. The traffic objective is designed to get people to click on your ad, which will then lead them off-site. You can direct traffic to a landing page, online store, donation page, or many other options.

Facebook even lets you choose from a variety of calls-to-action, such as “Learn More,” “Book Now,” “Download Now” and so on.

Video Views

Video content is increasing in popularity year after year. As Facebook’s own website claims, 100 million hours of video are viewed on Facebook each day, but many brands remain uncertain as to how they can promote their videos more effectively. This is where the Facebook video views campaign objective comes in: audience members can watch your branded videos directly on the platform (preferably with captions and no sound, as autoplay videos with sound are typically unpopular with Facebook users).

Event Responses

Are you hosting an event in your area soon? Do you offer free monthly webinars for anyone who signs up at your registration link? If so, then the event response campaign objective would be a much better option than a simple post engagement campaign because your call-to-action will specifically ask target audience members who view your ad to sign up for the event.

Have you ever considered how the word length of your blog posts can affect everything from your website’s search engine rankings to the number of leads generated by your content marketing strategy? If you’ve ever wondered whether you should be writing shorter or longer content to maximize your blog’s ROI, then here’s what you need to know about short versus long-form content:

Short-Form Content is More Feasible

How long does it take you (or your hired writers) to research, write, proofread and publish a blog post? Generally speaking, the longer the content is, the more time it’ll take, which equates to higher costs as well. Meanwhile, short-form content ensures you can regularly publish new, high-quality content on your blog without having to worry about sporadic gaps in your publishing schedule or going over budget when it comes to your content marketing strategy.

Short-form content should be at least 250 words to be effective and no more than 750 words to maintain your audience’s attention throughout the article. Another advantage to short-form content is that it avoids repetitiveness (repeating the same information, just with different words), which is a common problem experienced by long-form content writers who may run out of fresh ideas once they get past the 1,200 word mark.

Long-Form Content is Ideal for SEO

According to the top blogging statistics for 2019, the average blog post is 1,050 words long and the average length of top-performing blog content in Google searches ranges between 1,140-1,285 words. Although further research shows that long-form content can generate as much as 9x more leads than short-form content, just 18% of companies regularly publish blog posts that are longer than 750 words.

Additionally, there are many search engine optimization benefits to publishing long-form content, including: more backlinks, more social shares, better rankings on Google search, and so much more. If you want to increase your website’s ranking in the search engines, then producing high-quality, well-researched content in the 1,500-2,000 word range would be ideal for your SEO strategy.

Best Solution: Variety of Content Lengths?

Unless your marketing budget is exceptionally generous, you likely won’t be able produce long-form content often enough to satisfy your audience. However, this doesn’t mean you should solely focus on producing short-form content, either. For best results, you should experiment with a variety of content lengths and analyze your most valuable metrics (leads generated, backlinks acquired, social shares, etc.) to determine what the ideal length of your blog posts should be.